Second Sight

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We lay the cerebral smackdown in our full review.

By Juan Castro

In the beginning&#Array;

While playing Second Sight, the latest entry in the burgeoning trend of mind games, I noticed one thing and pondered another. First, I noticed that I hadn't been so enthralled by the narrative of a supposed "action" game in months. And second, I wondered what took developers so long to incorporate psychic abilities into video games? To be fair, certain games have done it before, but never like this.

The Jedi Knight series has dibs on force powers and every RPG in history lays claim to magical abilities. Admittedly, some of these abilities overlap, like the lighting powers in Jedi Knight and lightning bolt spells in RPGs. What differentiates Second Sight from these other games is the way it takes superpowers and weaves them into the overall narrative of the game.

Take a seat, it's story time&#Array;

Of course, I don't want to spoil anything. In terms of story, Second Sight kicks Psi Ops square in the nuts and makes fun of its mom. It's one of Second Sight's strongest selling points. You'll play an amnesiac by the name of John Vattic. After an absurdly long coma, John wakes up bloodied and bandaged in a government building. Without a clue as to where he is or even who he is, John slowly discovers that his mind brims with all manners of psychic coolness. He can move things by thought alone, heal himself with brain power and even project himself out of his body.

Unfortunately, John awakens from his coma without so much as a decent pair of pants. You'll spend the next 15 or so hours sneaking through an insane asylum, breaking into government buildings and storming a base in the frozen wasteland of Syberia. You'll uncover sinister plots, square off against twisted government officials and expose a heinous plot. Remove a few thousand bullets, throw in a few FBI agents and you have yourself the makings of a pretty decent X-Files episode.

Use the force&#Array;and a .45 pistol.

It's one of the most frequently asked questions in history: what super power would you want given the choice? It's a great question. And for good reason: everyone wants superpowers. Ask your neighbor, the paranoid lady across the street, even your priest, and they'll all say the same thing: everyone wants superpowers. Any why not? The entertainment industry dangles the concept in front of the consumer psyche through movies, books, and more specifically, video games. Recently, game developers have opted for a more scientific approach to the phenomenon.

All that remained 5 seconds later were teeth and fingernails.

Midway released the psychically charged Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy back in June, and now Codemaster's will unleash Second Sight. It is understood that gamers will compare the two. Lets' face it: they sound similar. Both feature amnesiac protagonists rippling with brainpower, and both follow non-linear story structures composed of several flashback tutorial sequences.

But we'll get to all of that a little later. For now, we'll stick to cerebral stuff. I'd like to describe in detail every single ability you can aqcuire, but I won't. Discovering new powers makes up a large part of the experience, so I'll remain a tad vague. I will say there are five main abilities, each of which evolves over the course of the game. Second Sight reveals two of the most useful abilities, healing and telekinesis, within the first three levels. Where telekinesis comes in handy to open doors and flip switches, the inclusion of a healing ability makes little sense.

Let me explain. Second Sight is not a hard game. Even without the healing ability, it wouldn't be too hard to get through for the average gamer. The game's lack of difficulty stems from two things: a near instantaneous re-filling of your psychic-power gauge whenever it's used, and the fact that you can absorb precisely 18 pounds of bullets before kissing pavement. To test this fact, I ran toward four armed guards and slapped them to death.